As a 100 percent mountain biker in high school, when I arrived at Indiana University in 1995 as a Freshman, I wanted nothing to do with riding road bikes. I was core mountain biker from my obnoxious neon yellow Bell Image helmet down to my ball burnished GT Zaskar with blue anodized components.  I wasn’t even planning on racing the Little 500 until my neighbor in the dorms, Martin Adamczyk, my 100 percent roadie counterpart, asked me if I wanted to assemble a team.

After learning that the track was a loose cinder composition and that there were coordinated bike maneuvers like exchanges, I happily obliged. It was going to be like racing mountain bikes or BMX, but on a circular track with semi-slick tires! We found a third guy, Corey Carrico, and proceeded to do the race as a three-man rookie team with very little training, guidance, or clue as to exactly what we were doing, and still managed to finish 13^th. At the time I was a pledge at Acacia Fraternity, and the following year the bike team was expecting me to step in and fill the shoes of a departing senior rider.

The Acacia Bike Team, led at the time by Justin O. Fox, A.K.A. Foxy, was a perennial favorite to win the Little 500. Having finished 2^nd in 1995 by a half bike length, and finishing 6^th in 1996 after being the only team to attempt chasing down Phi Delta Theta’s winning attack in the last few laps of the race, there was tremendous pressure on me to step in and pick up the reigns of the graduating seniors. Foxy talked the team up quite a bit, and a big perk of being a rider on Acacia was the fully paid spring break training in San Diego.

As I rode along the frigid snow-covered roads of Bloomington in the dead of winter with numb fingers and frozen cheeks, all I could think about was the prospect of riding in a sleeveless jersey along the ocean under warm, sunny California skies. I had only been to California once before in my life, but never to San Diego. Finally, March 12^th came, and we were on our way to a week of gorgeous weather and epic riding.

The flight went without a hitch, and we rented a huge 12 passenger van for the drive up to our two gorgeous condos in Solana Beach. When we arrived in our new digs, I felt like a celebrity. The condos were ocean-front perched at the edge of a 100 foot high bluff and practically brand new, and of course, they were paid for. We got our bikes assembled and went for an easy spin along the Pacific Coast Highway towards Encinitas. As our team rolled along the asphalt to the sight of a golden sunset, I knew for a fact that this was going to be a week to remember. And indeed it was, for more reasons than I anticipated.

The big ride of the week we were all getting ready for was the Wednesday morning ride from Swami’s Bike Shop in Encinitas. Before 2001, Camp Pendleton was a wide open Marine base north of Oceanside which had traffic free roads and paved trails all over its expansive tract of land. The Swami’s ride was approximately 70 miles from Encinitas, through Pendleton, up to San Clemente, with a turn around at the “Dolly Parton Memorial” – a power plant with two huge boob-like structures made famous in the Leslie Nielsen flick, The Naked Gun.

For days I had been mentally preparing myself to tear it up on the Swami’s ride, and our coach at the time, former Little 500 champion, Peter Noverr, gave us the lowdown on when things got fast, where to be, and who to look out for. Being a complete neophyte in the skinny tire world, I was clueless, and my appearance didn’t do much to hide my lack of cycling prowess: A 53cm Giant Cadex road bike with a long stem and longer seatpost to accommodate my six foot frame, a watermelon sized helmet, hairy legs and a small jersey which wandered up in the back revealing that I wasn’t wearing bibs. It was no wonder that nobody rode next to me as we cruised through Oceanside and onto Camp Pendleton ready to throw down.

There must have been 100 riders in the group when the peloton turned a corner to indicate the commencement of suffering. In order to show that I wasn’t messing around, I went straight to the front and sat fourth wheel while a small congregation of tri-geeks pounded away at the pedals. Actually, my tiny bike fit in rather well with the tri-geek crowd, so I began to feel a little bit more comfortable. That is until I looked down at my heart rate monitor to see it beeping and flashing like temperature gauge on a boiler tank that’s about to explode. I was redlined at over 200 BPM, but being a sprite nineteen year old, I had seen my max higher than that. Not panicking, I continued to ride four back, when out of nowhere, I hit a massive pothole.

My front tire went flat in a matter of seconds, and I managed to safely bring my miniature-sized Giant to a halt without getting run over by the peloton. As every one of my teammates including Foxy and Noverr passed, they all looked over with a “tough luck buddy” expression and kept riding. Thankfully, because of my extensive mountain biking background, I never left home without a pump or inner tube.

I got the flat changed, but to my dismay, the rolling village of lycra-clad two-wheelers were miles ahead by now, and there was no way I’d be able to catch up to test my fitness against San Diego’s finest. Instead of catching the group, fortune delivered me a far more painful fate.

I time-trialed along the rolling Camp Pendleton roads hoping to pick up a few stragglers when I came across an ambulance putting a female cyclist on a stretcher. There were about 20 riders standing around watching the incident, so I stopped to see what had happened. As I craned my neck to get a first hand look at the peril, my eyes fell upon an older man who appeared to be in his mid-50’s pedaling away from the scene of the accident.

“I’ll just catch up with Grandpa and put the hurt on him,” I thought to myself. The old man looked pretty fit, but come on, he was my Dad’s age for crying out loud! He had wrinkly tanned skin, characteristic of older Californian cyclists who spend a lot of time in the saddle, and for an old guy, this dude had some ripped leg muscles. He also had an odd looking curly white Afro mashed down under his helmet and rode a bright red KHS. I rode up to his wheel and noticed he could tell immediately without looking back that someone was behind him. Although I was bummed that a flat tire got me dropped from the pack of hammers, at least now I could put the hammer down on Old Man Afro and get a little psychological redemption. Yeah right.

Grandpa and I turned off the main road onto a long strip of airplane runway positioned parallel to Interstate 5, and then suddenly, all Hell broke loose. Old Man started pounding the pedals. I mean he was crushing them. Within two minutes of starting his pull, my tongue was getting stuck in my front wheel. I put my hands on the very inside of my Scott Drop-In handlebars hoping to get a little extra aerodynamic assistance, but to no avail. Grandpa was pulverizing me into the pavement like a jackhammer. His sinewy legs turned over a monstrous gear as I did everything possible to stay focused on his rear hub and not loose contact. Finally he pulled off indicating my turn to pull through, and for the first time in my life, I couldn’t do it. I was absolutely on the rivet and couldn’t do anything but muster a “nnnggghh” and a head nod indicating that he had to be locomotive again.

Gramps got back in front of me and went to hammering again. My heart rate monitor was now starting to smoke from all the beeping and flashing. My speedometer read 33 miles per hour, and we were on a dead flat with a slight headwind. I had to bring the effort down or I was going to KABOOM like a hand grenade. Grandpa started putting a 10 foot gap on me, and I was no longer catching his draft.

“Hey…dude…you…you’re…dropping me!”

“What?”

“I’m dropping!”

“Okay, okay. Just relax.”

Old Man Afro let up off the throttle and drifted back to my hunched over carcass gasping desperately for oxygen. He gave me a minute to recover, and motioned me to pull. Once I got my heart rate back to non-myocardial infarction levels, I was able to get the pace going. We got up to 30 miles an hour for a few minutes when I decided I had experienced enough pain at the front. I pulled off and motioned for Grandpa to pull through, and he did so in a well-trained manner with no surge or sudden acceleration. I got on his wheel and prepared for imminent suffering, but my preparations were futile.

For the next three miles I yo-yoed on and off Grandpa’s wheel using every last muscle in my body to try and stay attached. Every time I was gapped, I’d let out a desperate grunt, indicating to him that I was off, and he would ease up. Finally the pain and suffering came to a conclusion, and he pulled up aside me. For the first time since we started riding together nearly an hour before, he introduced himself.

“Great riding, kid. My name is John Howard.”

He shook my hand. I responded in a nonchalant unimpressed tone like I didn’t know who the Hell John Howard was – because I didn’t.

“Hi, I’m Kurt Gensheimer.”

He looked at me and smiled, not saying anything more. John Howard. Who the hell is that? I don’t know. Now if he said John Tomac, well shit, I would have dropped to my knees and kissed his feet chanting my lack of worthiness, but John Howard? I guess he’s just some really fast old guy or something.

After a few miles, we caught the main field on their return from San Clemente. I rode with my teammates and told them about the session of anaerobic punishment inflicted by a guy my Dad’s age. When my coach, Peter, came up aside me in his full team-issue Mongoose gear, he appeared irritated, but that’s wasn’t abnormal for him.

“What the Hell happened to you? Where were you? Why weren’t you at the front?”

“I was! But I hit a pothole and flatted.”

“Well did you get any hard riding in, or did you just mosey along by yourself?”

“No, I rode with this old guy. He kicked my ass!” Peter sighed and rolled his eyes.

“An old guy kicked your ass. Oh man. You got a long way to go, Kurt. Do you know who it was?”

“I think he said his name was John Howard.”

“John Howard! You rode alone with him?”

“Yeah. Who is he?”

“You don’t know who John Howard is?”

“Never heard of him.”

“Kurt, you don’t want to know who John Howard is.”

Sometimes ignorance is bliss, but in that instance, ignorance was anaerobic agony.